Higher Worlds

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria.

The heritage of the Gryphon will choose its own. The time of choice is now. The urge within him is overwhelming, and Kerovan - he of the cloven hooves and amber eyes - is driven toward the mountains - toward the dark. With him goes the Lady Joisan, who carries with her secrets unknown to Kerovan.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.

This is a revised edition of Courting Danger by Dale Leatherman, who co-authored the original with Alice Marble in 1990. It corrects minor errors that have come to light during the past three decades. Alice Marble was a rebel in her time--outspoken, bold and beautiful, a tennis champion whose powerful game and glamorous exploits captivated the public and press in the 1930s. Her public life was filled with success. Championships at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open made her the top-ranked player in the U.S. from 1936 to 1940. And Hollywood friendships with Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn,...

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

Some men just won't take no for an answer. My life was good. Simple. I had a cushy job in the Falcon Army baking bread and fancy desserts for our warlord. But ever since I saved the Falcon Lord's life, he won't stop hounding me to become his valorian. He doesn't even know if it will work; I might end up with an extended lifespan and that's it. But he insists that I'm meant to be his, and damn if I don't want it to be true. I just wish that becoming the Falcon Lord's valorian didn't include all that other stuff. You know, like immortality and the likelihood that being immortal won't save me ...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.

Brilliant offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history - from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. Jane Brox plumbs the class implications of light - who had it, who didn't - through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. Brillant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and - only a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United States - timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light.

Sometimes the past leaves you no choice but to fight for a future.Immerse yourself in the heart-stopping world of World War II, where duty collides with morality and survival demands more than courage — it requires sacrifice. With two of their men wounded a company of English soldiers takes shelter in a convent. Also seeking sanctuary there is Joliane, a young Frenchwoman who is wanted by the local Marquis for supposedly collaborating with the Gestapo. Discovering that when they leave, she will be taken away and shot, Albert Clemens, the company sergeant, decides to take her with them. ...

Previous accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the "Cajamarca miracle" - in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands - demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world—everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity.

At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

Over the course of the last half dozen years, China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has made extraordinary changes which have profound implications not only for the Chinese people but nations throughout the world. Given how swiftly and fundamentally China's relations with the rest of the world are changing under Xi's rule, it is imperative that we know what Xi Jinping Thought is, how it evolved, and why it is so important.

In 1901, Buffalo, New York, the eighth biggest city in America, wanted to launch the new century with the Pan American Exposition. It would showcase the Western hemisphere and bring millions of people to Western New York. With Niagara Falls as a drawing card, and with stunning colors and electric lights, promoters believed it would be bigger, better, and - literally - more brilliant than Chicago's White City of 1893.

Everything changed the day a faerie fell into my tomatoes. I thought I had my life planned out. My farm was prosperous, and I was on the verge of proposing to my childhood sweetheart. I'd have a family. A normal life. And then the Eagle Lord crashed into my crops—a giant bird with a broken wing. I foolishly tried to save him from the monster who was stalking him, and he repaid me by giving me immortality. Sounds good, doesn't it? Except immortality isn't free, even when it's a gift. Taryn Savagas wants me to fight beside him. To give up everything I have and everything I am to be his ...

Master of Thin Air opens with a fall that the author very nearly could not stop down an almost vertical rock ramp leading to a 3,000-foot drop. The qualities that saved him then on K2 - in addition to his mountaineering know-how and sheer good luck - drove his 16-year journey to summit all of the world's 8,000ers, the 14 peaks that exceed 8,000 meters (26,000-plus feet) and take climbers into the death zone. Incredibly, he accomplished that feat without the aid of bottled oxygen for every mountain but one.

Amazons - fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world - were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles displayed their valor in duels with Amazon queens, and the Athenians reveled in their victory over a powerful Amazon army. In historical times, Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman general Pompey tangled with Amazons.

David Bodanis demystifies the world's most famous equation, explaining its science and bringing it to life. He makes clear the astonishing array of discoveries and consequences it made possible and its impact on our daily lives. At last, the masses can understand that Einstein did nothing less than open the door to the inner structure of the universe.

Sixteenth-century Europe was a time of destabilization of age-old norms and the waging of religious wars - yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacific culture cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers who sat on Europe's thrones, most notably Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de' Medici.